BERNADETTE HALL was born
in Central Otago in 1945 and now teaches and writes (plays as well
as poetry) in Christchurch. She has had five collections of poetry
published, the most recent being Settler Dreaming (Victoria
University Press, 2001). Over the last 10 years, her work has been
included in a wide range of anthologies and literary journals, such
as Landfall, Sport, Soho Square (Bloomsbury).
In 1991, she was writer in residence at the University of Canterbury
and in 1996 held the Robert Burns Fellowship at Otago University,
Dunedin. In 1997, she spent three months at the University of Iowa,
USA, representing New Zealand as a member of the International Writers
Community which gathers there each year. For 10 years, she was poetry
editor of Takahe, a New Zealand literary magazine which publishes
poetry and short stories from both local and international writers.

My lay-sister is
an amalgam, Hall comments. She springs from anecdotes
related to me by a number of Catholic Sisters, now in their 60s, who
as modern free spirits recall with amusement and regret the strict
discipline and fear of the world which marked their experiences
as religious novices in convents of the 1950s. Irish Catholicism,
as the famous French missionary to these islands, Suzanne Aubert,
noted in the late 19th century, brought some strange aberrations with
it to this particular British colony. Disciplines and penances became
more conservative, sometimes bizarre, after the huge loss of confidence
in civilisation that marked the end of World War II.

I was brought up,
a post-war baby, in a small-city Catholic community that was proud,
theatrical and pretty much enclosed. The Sisters who taught me were
highly educated, fastidious, impressive women, all mind and spirit
and no body. So I have had to learn to love the body and to trust
the world  to become real in the way in which my
lay-sister is real. Lay-sisters were not fully professed members of
a religious order. They lacked education and gentility, but they did
most of the donkey work. Stories about them often mention their humanity,
grit and good-humour. I love my lay-sister and its these qualities
in her that I hope will touch readers.